Sustainable Data from Digital Fieldwork

Edited by Linda Barwick and Nicholas Thieberger

Academic fieldwork data collections are often unique and unrepeatable records of highly significant events collected at considerable expense of researcher time, effort and resources. While fieldworkers have been quick to take advantage of digital technologies to enable them to collect and organise their data, standards and workflows are only now beginning to emerge to assist researchers to submit their data for archiving and access.
This collection of refereed papers from the conference of the same name held at the University of Sydney in December 2006 provides a record of recent research practice by fieldworkers in linguistics, botany and anthropology, and by archive and repository managers.

Linda Barwick is a musicologist and professor at the University of Sydney’s Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Nicholas Thieberger is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the University of Melbourne.

1. Sustainable data from digital fieldwork: the state of the art (Sydney,
2006)Linda Barwick

Part 1: fieldwork to archive
2. Issues in the creation of a digital archive of a signed languageTrevor Johnston and Adam Schembri
3. Powerless in the field: a cautionary tale of digital dependenciesTom Honeyman
4. Archiving directly from the fieldLaura Robinson
5. From trees to descriptions and identification toolsBarry Conn and Kipiro Damas

Part 2: best practice?
6. When best practice isn't necessarily the best thing to do: dealing with capacity limits in a developing countryJohn Bowden and John Hajek
7. Proficient, permanent or pertinent: aiming for sustainabilityDavid Nathan
8. Finding the locus of best practice: technology training in an Alaskan language communityAndrea Berez and Gary Holton
9. E-MELD and the School of Best Practices: an ongoing community effortJessica Boynton, Steve Moran, Anthony Aristar and Helen Aristar-Dry